Back up with Dropbox. Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
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So as you know, by now, I'm a huge fan of backing up.
I think it's one of the single most important things that you and I can do as
users of our computers as users of our technology in general.
The problem, of course,
is that the backups that we generally think of are what I would call daily.
I espouse using a tool like Macrium Reflect or Easeus Todo or any of many of the others
that will do the same thing to take a daily backup of your entire machine.
There are different ways to do that.
I've got lots of articles on doing that on askleo.com.
The problem with that approach, though, is what happens halfway through the day?
The scenario that we care about here is that you're spending all morning working
on, say, a document or some kind of important piece of information on your
computer and your hard disk crashes, and that information is gone forever.
Tools like Dropbox can help.
They can help a lot by giving what I will call near real time backing up.
So Dropbox and Dropbox like programs work in an interesting way.
When we talk about them, we often think of you install Dropbox
on Machine A, you stall Dropbox on Machine B,
sign them both into the same account, and then whatever file you put
on Machine A's Dropbox folder shows up on Machine B and vice versa.
That's an oversimplification of what
really happens, though, because honestly, Machine B isn't really even needed when
you actually create a file in your Dropbox folder on the machine A,
it will automatically get uploaded to your online storage to your cloud account
with Dropbox from there, it then gets downloaded to Machine B if
Machine B exists or Machines B and C and D if you have multiple like I do.
The important thing, though, is that the document got uploaded to the cloud.
The other nuance is that it's not just placing a file in your Dropbox folder,
it's updating a file in your Dropbox folder.
So if you simply make a change to a file and hit save and that file is being saved
into your Dropbox folder, it automatically gets copied to the cloud.
That sounds like a backup in almost real time.
Let's walk through setting up Dropbox so that you could do exactly that.
So this is my Windows Ten machine.
You can see that I don't yet have Dropbox installed on it.
In fact, there's nothing in the D menu here at all.
That means, though, is that we're going to go out to Dropbox.com
Now, one of my gripes about Drop box right now is that they are trying very, very,
very hard to push their paid subscriptions.
I get that. It may or may not be something
that you want to investigate someday, but to actually get their free version,
which absolutely still exists, is not obvious.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to start by signing in now.
Since we don't already have a Dropbox
account, you'll click on create an account now to create a Dropbox account.
All you really need is a name,
an email address
and a password.
Have to of course, agree to the terms of service and create an account.
This is where you get the choice to sign up for one of the paid plans.
I am going to go ahead and last pass save
my credentials because we'll be using those from time to time.
But you can see here you've got plus you've got family.
You've got business. You can try them each three for 30 days.
Don't bother with any of that.
The key is this link down here
at the bottom that says or continue with the two gigabyte Dropbox basic plan.
The two gigabyte plan is exactly that.
You have 2GB of cloud storage.
If later you find you need more.
Fine, you can upgrade.
But for now, for the kinds of things
that we're doing on a daily basis, for the small stuff that most people are
interested in doing, 2GB is a great place to start, and that's what we'll do.
The next step is in fact, to download Dropbox app on your machine.
That app is what will cause some
of the behavior that I was telling you about earlier.
We'll go ahead and open the installer
and run it.
I'm going to go ahead and minimize
the browser window at this point and Leo the Dropbox installer do its thing
now for reasons unknown, Dropbox insists on bringing up another browser window.
We'll make that one go away for the time being.
This is the Dropbox app running on my PC.
You can see that down here in the lower right hand corner.
There is an icon for Dropbox that's been
added to the notification area and it's waiting to be linked to a Dropbox account.
What we'll do is sign in using the account we just created
and Dropbox is installed.
Now there are advanced settings that I'll at least look at real quick.
There's nothing you really need to change here at this time.
Dropbox will then give you some options
here to say make them local or make them online only at this point.
The simplest solution is to say if make files local
that way, all of the files that appear in your Dropbox will always be copied
to your machine as disk space comes to a premium,
then maybe mixing some of the files on line only is a good approach.
But with a two gigabyte Dropbox account,
that's probably not something we need to investigate right away.
We'll talk about keeping your PC backed up as a separate step.
We'll say not now.
For now.
What we've done now is we have opened
Windows File Explorer on our Dropbox folder.
You can see here.
It says Leo Note and Boom, my account home directory and a Dropbox folder.
You can also see it here on the side, same location.
Any file that I now place in this Dropbox folder will get placed in Dropbox online.
Now, normally, you're not doing anything special.
You are using whatever programs you're
using and you kind of want to understand what Dropbox is up to.
You can click on the Dropbox icon
and you can see here that this includes three or four very interesting icons.
The magnifying glass is, of course, a search to search across your Dropbox.
The file folder is what opens up Windows File Explorer on your Dropbox folder.
The globe is what opens your Dropbox folder in your browser.
Now in your browser.
Of course, you'll see all files.
We actually haven't uploaded anything.
They've suggested some folders.
I find it's great that they're making suggestions.
We don't need suggestions.
What we need to do is use these folders ourselves.
And again, the key takeaway from what it
means to be using Dropbox is if I now go and create a file,
I'll call it Exam Leo TXT, and I create that in my Dropbox folder.
Then you can see automatically that file has shown up online in my Dropbox.
Com cloud storage.
I could modify the file here and it'll you modified on my PC.
If I modify it on my PC, it'll be uploaded here.
That's the fundamental thing we're relying on when it comes to Dropbox.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and close this for the time being.
The important thing to note here is this path.
If we actually take a look at the path that I'm using, you can see that it's C
users
my login name on this machine
Dropbox.
You can create more subfolders if you
like, they will be replicated to the cloud and to other machines as well.
For this example,
I'm going to keep it simple and we're just going to use this one folder.
So now that we've got Dropbox installed,
how do we make it saves the work in progress?
Well, I don't have any apps like Word or
Excel installed on this machine, but I am going to show you exactly what it
is you might change should you be interested in changing it?
So that when you do your work in those
applications, your default folder becomes your Dropbox folder.
I'm going to fire up Edge and go into settings.
I'm going to search for download.
And if we scroll down far enough, you'll see that there's this location.
See users Leo downloads. Let's change that.
Let's change that to be my Dropbox folder.
So
that would be Dropbox.
And if you take a look after we've
selected the folder, you can see now that this says C users not Dropbox.
What that means is that every time I download a file in Edge,
it will get placed in the Dropbox folder automatically without my having to do
a thing, then Dropbox will notice the file exists and it will automatically then also
upload that file to my Dropbox account online.
Then if I have other PCs that are signed into the same Dropbox account,
they too will automatically download the same file into their Dropbox folders.
Now here I've changed the download folder for Microsoft Edge.
What you might consider doing,
but I strongly suggest you consider doing is in whatever application you use day
to day change the default document location to be your Dropbox folder.
In the companion article for this video,
I show an example of changing the document location for Microsoft Word.
Changing the document location
for Microsoft Word to be user login Name Dropbox means that every
time time you create a new document in Word, it gets placed in that folder.
That means that every time you hit save,
every time you close the document, every time you update the document,
it automatically gets uploaded to your Dropbox folder online.
And again, any other machines that happen to be in that same Dropbox account.
Now you'll notice that we did gloss over
something that, on its surface seemed kind of pertinent to the discussion we're
having and that's this concept of keeping your file backed up.
You'll notice that they continue
to advertise the availability of this feature.
This brings us back to that same screen we saw earlier as we were setting things up.
You can tell Dropbox that in addition
to your Dropbox folder, it should also deal with your desktop,
your documents, your downloads, and potentially even a few more folders.
If you're so inclined.
If you do that, then anything that is
currently in these folders, anything that is eventually added to these
folders will be replicated to your Dropbox account online.
That might be a good thing.
There's two problems with that and why I
recommend you not enable this at this time.
First problem is that I
have seen either Drop box or one drive, which has a similar feature or some
of the other cloud storage providers really, really confuse things where
there are multiple document folders or there are multiple downloads folders.
It can be very,
very disconcerting depending on exactly how this feature is implemented.
Think Dropbox does it right.
The real issue here is that you'll be
surprised at how much you have in those folders right now.
Remember, we started with a two gigabyte free Dropbox account.
You could easily blow that simply by turning on this backup
because there's a good chance you've got more than 2GB of data in these folders.
So for now,
I strongly recommend you say not now, and continue backing up those folders some
other way, hopefully using your nightly backup.
But by using Dropbox to back up its own
folder regularly in real time and changing.
That should be the default location for all of your work.
You get nearly real time backup for free.
And as I close out,
the written article on this Dropbox can be an important part of a healthy backup
strategy for updates for related links again for the article on which this video
was based, with the examples that it contains, visit askleo.com/17696.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com.